Apiary: Making API Development Simple and Collaborative

Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) play an increasingly important role in enterprise app development. As companies turn to APIs to gain the upper hand, developers are focusing extensively on better tools and services in developing and designing APIs. Understanding the developers’ needs, Apiary, a San Francisco-based company, is helping organizations create efficient programming interfaces by making API development effortless and collaborative. The company’s team provides opportunities to app developers, testers, architects, product managers, clients, and partners to collaboratively build and design APIs by bringing their own unique perspectives. “We provide enterprises with developer-centric solutions that include tooling for every stage of the API lifecycle: designing, prototyping, testing, and documentation,” says Jakub Nešetřil, Founder and CEO of Apiary.

According to Nešetřil, developers today are citing quality documentation as the most imperative API feature. Understanding this need, Apiary builds vital and rich documentation for the benefit of developers. Additionally, the company’s API blueprint allows enterprises to specify each action performed on a resource. This is further specified with a sub-heading inside a resource with the name of the action followed by the HTTP method. API blueprint is a language agnostic, human readable format to discuss about web APIs. Through a single dashboard, Apiary offers organizations the provision to centralize and manage all of the blueprints. Providing a preview of what the documentation will look like, the company also implements blueprint editor which gives instant feedback to ensure syntax accuracy. “Blueprint editor facilitates clients with instant feedback on any warnings or errors that might occur in the blueprint,” says Nešetřil.

Moreover, through the Apiary for Teams platform, the company is facilitating organizations to manage settings for new blueprints, ensuring that it remains secure by being available to internal users only. Similarly, Apiary for Enterprise empowers developers and architects to contribute to the designing of API lifecycle and enables organizations to confirm various blueprints for consistency. With the help of this solution, designers can receive real-time response during the design process and detect inconsistencies.

Apiary has been empowering organizations to overcome their business challenges and achieve desired goals. Companies such as Microsoft, Salesforce, Akamai, and hundreds of businesses around the world trust Apiary‘s intuitive, simplified workflow and robust platform for developing reliable APIs. To deliver more beneficial results, Apiary is offering up-to-date documentation through its product Dredd, which is a command-line test runner for testing an enterprise’s backend application on the HTTP layer. The product enables documentation-driven and test-driven development of APIs. “Dredd works by taking an organization’s API blueprint documentation and then creating expectations based on the requests and responses in the blueprint to offer beneficial results,” says Nešetřil.

We provide enterprises with developer-centric solutions that include tooling for every stage of the API lifecycle: designing, prototyping, testing, and documentation

The company is leveraging unique API tools to empower organizations and provide them with the option of granting team members appropriate access—powerful editor or restricted viewer access. Apairy is backed by enterprises like Flybridge, Baseline Ventures, and Credo Ventures, and currently supports nearly 160,000 APIs. For the days to come, the company plans to innovate and provide more unique solutions to completely make the API development process a simple task for developers to quickly design, prototype, document, and test APIs.